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Just as the layers of ice sheets in Greenland can tell scientists about Earth’s past climate, these layers in the martian north pole have been laid down over the years and could contain evidence of the past climate of Mars. HiRISE took this image at the edge of the ice sheet, where it’s easiest to differentiate the two layers.
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April 2nd, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Why are a number of images so white? We are used to seeing Martian red. It looks like snow or ice but surely not. Is it just natural rock color?
April 2nd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
White sand, mostly, but there is a great deal of water ice in the polar caps as well as seasonal frozen CO2 (dry ice).
Southern New Mexico contains a large white sand desert, which I’d highly recommend to anyone who has never visited!
April 3rd, 2010 at 7:21 am
John, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mostly “sees” only red. So many of the photos you are looking at monotone – white when Mars is very red and black when Mars is not red at all.
The oribiter does have some limited capability to see other colors, but can’t distinguish very well between them. That limited capability is used to try to calculate color images when the need arises, as you see in some of the photos, but they are not very color accurate. Many times the choice of color is to make features more distinct, rather than to show what they would look like to the human eye.
And actually, a good example of how false color images can throw people off are are lot of the early Mars photos – which were tinted too heavily red.
June 13th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
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